Vitanuova for 2003 November 1

Berkeley

I was in Berkeley for Halloween and had a nice time.

Clock puzzle

Dudeney's 536-puzzle collection has an interesting problem about an analog clock. (I don't think digital clocks even existed when Dudeney wrote the problem.) Suppose you have a clock with identical hour and minute hands. Some times are unambiguous. For example, if you see one hand pointing directly to the right and one hand pointing directly up, you know it is 3:00; there is no other interpretation possible. (It can't be that the hand pointing straight up is the hour hand, because it would have to be 1/4 past the hour, whereas in that impossible interpretation it is right on the hour.) Dudeney asks what the first time after midnight when an ambiguity occurs will be -- when you can't tell what time it is by looking at the clock.

I haven't solved this yet, but I did discover precisely when all the times are at which the hour and minute hands co-incide. Of course, this happens 13 times from midnight until noon (including both midnight and noon), because the minute hand will have to cross the hour hand once each hour. The first of these times after midnight is 1 hour and 1/11th hour past midnight (around 1:05:45).

Wannsee

I finished Eichmann in Jerusalem on Saturday. (I lost my original copy in L.A. last week, so I had to buy a new copy to finish the book.) The Holocaust in Eichmann in Jerusalem is a lot more subtle and complex than the Holocaust I had heard of before -- for example, take the "deportations" sections, with their discussions of various countries' responses to Nazi requests. You might have thought that, roughly speaking, other European countries, when asked by Nazi Germany, largely all rounded up their Jews right away and shipped them off to concentration camps (with the exception of Denmark, right?).

But the countries actually exhibited a bewildering variety of behaviors in response to the German demands. Some complied eagerly, some dragged their feet, some (not just Denmark) resisted, and one, Arendt says, was so zealous in killing Jews that the Nazis actually intervened to get them to tone it down a little. The factors that went into these decisions were incredibly many and directly affected who lived and who died.

This is just one of the complexities Arendt raises in her account of the Eichmann trial.

What I would like to do now is finish my essay about my visit to the House of the Wannsee Conference and post it together with my pictures of the same.